And the Mountains Echoed

I am one of those people who are author loyalists more than genre loyalists. So as a kid, once I got hooked to Satyajit Ray or Enid Blyton or Alfred Hitchcock, I wouldn’t rest till I had read ALL their books, irrespective of what they wrote. So, I devoured Blyton’s Malory Towers with the equal enthusiasm that I reserved for Five Find Outers or the Famous Five, even though the last one I sincerely disliked. When it came to Ray, the scope was wider as I did not just stop with his books, but went on to his movies or even translations, as I have already talked about here.

As I grew up and moved on to other writers like Agatha Christie, Sidney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer, Jane Austen or Ayn Rand, I usually ended up reading almost ALL their works, even though many of them were just rehashed versions of the earlier ones or simply just not as good. But it didn’t matter: for that one year or so, I would be like a loyal wife, tied to the writer, for better or for worse. Until I had devoured their entire collection and moved on to someone else. The same holds true even for Indian writers, be it the nuanced work of Jhumpa Lahiri, the gloomy magic of Arvind Adiga or even the irrepressible wit of Sidin Vadukut. And I have hated Chetan Bhagat with the same gusto, without missing out on any of his five best-sellers.

And then I discovered Khaled Hosseini during my college days. I finished The Kite Runner in a couple of days, bunking lectures, missing out on meals and dismissing anybody/anything that came in the way during those two days. Assignments, CGPA, social life be damned, I was too intricately involved in the lives of Amir, Hassan and Ali, swayed by a myriad of emotions. No wonder then, when his second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns released when I was in my MBA first year, I had no hesitation in treating myself to a copy, ignoring impending exams, placements and financial crisis. While I found the book distinctly more depressing that the first, the impact it made was significantly deeper, if not more satisfying. May be because it was a story of two women in a society which traditionally treated its women with disdain. May be because the memory of reading The Colour Purple was still fresh in my mind. Or may be because both stories resonated strongly against the backdrop of the trying socio-economic circumstances and my inexperienced, privileged and young mind was shocked to the core.

So this weekend when I got my hands on the recently released third book, “And the Mountains Echoed” by the same author, it didn’t take much to put me under house arrest for two days, postponing chores/outings/drinking plans as I devoured the 400+ pages like a hungry child fresh from a hunger strike. This time it was a brother-sister story underlying the multitude of sub-plots across geographies, generations and relationships.

Yes, it’s true to the Hosseini style of writing: intricate details in the backdrop of history with a tinge of longing…

Yes, it retains the simple innocence of putting family at the forefront: from the father-son tale in The Kite Runner to the mother-daughter struggle in The Thousand Splendid Suns to the brother-sister bond in this one…

Yes, all the twists come together in the end to render it a complete narrative…

And yet, it somehow falls short of the hallmark of a truly great story; it somehow falls short of my expectations; it somehow leaves me asking for more…

The mountain in the background echoes again: may be it’s time to move on…